


Standing Together

by HSavinien



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Crushes, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Labor Unions, Nwalin Week, Protests, no cops nwalin week
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-03
Updated: 2020-08-03
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:42:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25696717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HSavinien/pseuds/HSavinien
Summary: Nori's not really a protest sort of person. Dwalin, apparently, is.
Relationships: Dwalin/Nori (Tolkien), Referenced - Relationship
Kudos: 8





	Standing Together

The drovers and caravanners stopped work the week after the miners. Nori hadn’t been paying attention ‘til that point. He wasn’t a miner, miners didn’t have anything worth conning away, and while they were nominally the lifeblood of the community, the epitome of dwarven industry, and so on and so forth, the work stoppage mostly affected the miners themselves and the nobles who benefitted from their work. He didn’t have to care.

The caravanners apparently cared. King’s-cousin Dwalin, arms folded, took up position next to the miners’ representatives with two drovers and another caravan leader, increasing the amount of bulging muscle in the courtyard outside the lawhouse about four times. (Miners were strong, to be sure, but tended toward wiry nimbleness over power.) Each of them wore the same badge as the miners, the clan mark of the two miners who’d died in the last cave-in.

That was worth paying attention to. Without the caravanners, the settlement wouldn’t get many of the goods that made life worth living - hard to grow grain enough for beer and bread in the thin soil of the Blue Mountains. Without the drovers, no livestock could go to market, and no new breeding stock would be brought in.

The nobles would feel the pinch, especially once the merchants started howling about lost trade. This would shut down the mountain.

And Dwalin, kin to the lost throne of Erebor (and several of those nobles) was dressed in working clothes and the badge of dead miners. That would turn some heads. It’d certainly turned Nori’s, but he had no illusions about his attraction to muscles attached to kind hearts. (It was exasperating, but the libido wanted what it wanted.)

Nori ducked into an alley, pulled out all his hairpins, and braided his hair down into four thick-rolled plaits. If he was going to join the protest, which he was,  _ apparently, _ he didn’t feel like being particularly identifiable if any nobles decided to make trouble later. They certainly wouldn’t be targeting Dwalin - Dwalin’s sib and cousins were fearsome in subtle ways - but Nori didn’t trust that the rest of the crowd could count on the same careful treatment. With a sigh, he slid his way into the quiet crowd, edging around little knots of dwarves until he could get a close, uninterrupted view of Dwalin. Might as well have something nice to look at while protesting unwarranted death.


End file.
